I can’t think of a better way to describe my beat there than by pasting the reply I offered after a friend asked me over the weekend to come up with a New Year’s resolution related to my work climate change: Read more…

The Oceti Sakowin camp in a snow storm on Nov. 29 during a protest against the Dakota Access pipeline.Credit Stephanie Keith/Reuters

An extraordinary upwelling of activism in support of Indian land rights and expressing environmental concerns — focused on blocking the planned path of the multi-billion-dollar Dakota Access Pipeline — achieved a remarkable victory today.

Here’s The New York Times summary: “Federal officials announced on Sunday that they would not approve permits for construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline beneath a dammed section of the Missouri River that tribes say sits near sacred burial sites.” [Read the rest.]

A planned fire burned through needles, branches and logs around sequoias and other trees on June 11 in Kings Canyon National Park.Credit National Park Service/ R. Paterson

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Legal scholars and philosophers focused on the environment discussed the evolving notion of wilderness at a workshop high in the Sierras.Credit Andrew C. Revkin

In this centennial year of the National Park System, it’s been encouraging to see management of the western components of this remarkable ecological patrimony shifting ever so slowly toward incorporating knowledge of natural cycles of fire in maintaining forest health. For forests in California’s Sierra Nevada, particularly, a dangerous and ecologically disruptive “fire deficit” has been built through generations of land policies fixated on fire suppression.

In early June, I was fortunate to see an all-too-rare prescribed burn while spending several days in Kings Canyon National Park, mainly at a fascinating workshop hosted by the University of Illinois law and philosophy program focused on the evolving meanings of both “wilderness” and “wildness” on a planet increasingly shaped by humans.

But we also got to explore, spending some time in the Redwood Canyon section of the park, where several trails wind through the world’s largest grove of giant sequoias. We met up with a Park Service fire crew readying the area for a prescribed burn over the following week. Click here to track how the operation was carried out.

The problem?

It took 13 years to carry out this one 760-acre planned fire. The state’s stringent air quality rules add vast regulatory obligations to planned a managed fire but don’t apply if the same area ends up burning on its own — as would be inevitable. Read on for more on that issue. Read more…

Linda Gormezano and her scat-sniffing dog, Quinoa, scanning the coast of Hudson Bay a decade ago.

Credit American Museum of Natural History

Dot Earth often had the feel of an accelerating hamster wheel (see posts marked with the fire hose image). But it was a wheel of my own creation, given the broad question I chose to pursue starting back in October, 2007 – how do humans navigate this century with the fewest regrets?

Countless relevant developments and insights slipped by before I could note them, which is why Twitter and Facebook, in the end, became my real web log – my way of assessing, relating and sharing consequential nuggets crossing my screen. (I hope you’ll continue to follow me there; just click on the preceding links.)

Before this blogging adventure ends this weekend, there’s one sad development that I feel compelled to catch up with — the untimely death in August 2015 of Linda J. Gormezano — a tireless Arctic-focused field biologist from the American Museum of Natural History.

I first wrote about Gormezano’s innovative work studying coyote and polar bear populations with the help of her scat-sniffing Dutch shepherd, Quinoa, back in 2007. But I kept track of the important batch of studies she produced in subsequent years, and the healthy debate they had prompted. Her work showed that polar bears, while best known for their life at sea or on sea ice pursuing seals, have been able, at least in some circumstances, to gain significant nutrition on land as well, scarfing down geese and goose eggs, grasses and other fare when sea ice is in retreat.

Robert F. Rockwell, a Museum of Natural History population biologist and ecologist who was one of Gormezano’s mentors since she started at the museum as a grad student, made no secret of his frustration with what he felt was agenda-driven resistance to publishing some of her findings.

Rockwell has posted an inspiring written and pictorial tribute to Gormezano. I hope you’ll click and read and pass it around. He starts out describing her, as a spirited and talented student, as “every professor’s dream.”

In this excerpt, you can read how she quickly became much more than that, steering the museum’s research program in new directions: Read more…

The discussion was happily recorded by Heleo, a web enterprise devoted to fostering consequential conversations. Read on for excerpts from the video and Heleo’s helpful transcript, but I encourage you to watch and/or read the longer conversation at the links below: Read more…

The Fight to Save the Amazon

In 1988, the murder of Chico Mendes sparked a movement of environmental activists, celebrities and indigenous peoples that made saving the Brazilian rain forest an international rallying cry. But what is happening there now?

I was happy to see this fresh Retro Report production on the legacy of Chico Mendes, the Brazilian rain forest defender who was slain by a ranching family in December, 1988 as land conflicts followed road building in the depths of the Amazon. Retro Report is an innovative journalism project revisiting stories long after the headlines have flowed by. The resulting videos provide an invaluable learning tool for students of all ages interested in media cycles and keeping an eye on what’s real. As I wrote a few days ago, such efforts are more important than ever given the fact-free nature of so much online discourse.

[Steve Schwartzman, an anthropologist who worked closely with Mendes and has spent decades working in the Amazon and other forest regions for the Environmental Defense Fund, analyzes what has and hasn’t changed in Brazil’s rain forests.] Read more…

In test flights last summer, several organizations used a drone to connect remote villages in a roadless region of Madagascar with Centre ValBio, a Stony Brook University research hub. Medicines and medical samples can be swiftly transported this way.Credit Jaydon Kiernan and Koeun Choi

When drones are in the news these days, the context is typically war or surveillance or the speedy deliver of packages to impatient consumers. Here, Heidi Hutner of Stony Brook University offers a “Your Dot” contribution on a recent test in a roadless region in Madagascar that could signal an exciting new frontier for this technology – helping deliver health care to some of the world’s poorest, most isolated communities.

Speeding Madagascar Health Care by Air

By Heidi Hutner

Last summer, Stony Brook University’s Global Health Institute teamed up with Vayu, Inc., a Michigan start-up developing drones aiding medical care, to test aerial shipments of blood and fecal samples and drugs between remote villages in Madagascar and Centre ValBio, the university’s biological research center adjacent to a national park.

Parasitic diseases, tuberculosis and a range of other life-threatening illnesses are common among the Malagasy population. But many people live in remote and inaccessible areas. In Ifanadiana, the district where the drone flights took place, travel to medical facilities can take a day or more by foot, across treacherous terrain.

“Often, the sick don’t want to walk long distances, they don’t want to leave their children behind and, in many cases, they associate hospitals with bad outcomes and death,” said Dr. Peter M. Small, who heads the university’s health institute and was formerly deputy director of the Tuberculosis Delivery Program for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Medical teams visiting rural communities in Madagascar must tote heavy equipment and supplies such as liquid nitrogen, centrifuges, 40-pound generators, and several weeks’ supply of rice.

Last summer, when four Stony Brook medical students—Jaydon Kiernan, Paul Castle, Koeun Choi, and Lee Hakami—planned a health research project in Madagascar, Small explored the idea of using drones to cut the time between diagnosis and treatment by transporting blood and fecal samples from patients to the laboratory at the ValBio research center.

The Centre ValBio was founded in 2012 by Stony Brook primatologist and conservationist Dr. Patricia Wright, who for decades has worked in the region to conserve Madagascar’s endangered lemurs while advancing economic prospects for rural communities. [Learn more in this 2012 Dot Earth post by Wright: “A High-Rise Lab Amid Madagascar’s Troubled Treetops.”]

But there’s much more to be done. I’ve tried to do my small part, writing the introduction to a related illustrated young-adult book, “How to Fake a Moon Landing,” and sifting for ways to #makeveracitycool Of course, veracity isn’t a much-used word these days. And humans’ tendency to place tribal affiliations ahead of reality continues to create challenges for those who might want to provide clarity amid overheated discourse.

I’m basically making the case for a broadening of how folks think about Earth’s human age. So far, misanthropy has dominated. Woe is me; shame on us. But our exasperating diversity of perception, experience and character may be our salvation in the end.

About

By 2050 or so, the human population is expected to pass nine billion. Those billions will be seeking food, water and other resources on a planet where humans are already shaping climate and the web of life. Dot Earth was created by Andrew Revkin in October 2007 -- in part with support from a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship -- to explore ways to balance human needs and the planet's limits.